As Mrs Gandhi approaches the mid-point of her five-year term she is desperately in need of ways to bolster her government's sagging image. But was her cabinet reshuffle anything more than cosmetic and is the new 20-point programme really a carefully assessed set of priorities or simply an updated version of the old 20-point programme? An in-depth analysis of the prime minister's latest attempts to carry out her campaign promises.

An atomic power station is likely to come up near Delhi in the next plan. A high-powered team from the Energy Ministry which has been making the rounds of northern states has suggested Kotla lake in Gurgaon district of Haryana as a possible location for the plant.

Inscrutable are the ways of public-sector trade unions. The Federation of the State Trading Corporation Employees' Unions lived up to this image when it resorted to an eight-day strike last fortnight over a peculiarly non-economic issue.

Even as staccato rifle-fire shattered the afternoon calm at Bareilly Central Prison last fortnight, a large and violent mob of over 500 convicts succeeded in smashing its way through the two inner gates of the jail and reaching the main silver-coloured outer gates - just half-a-step from freedom.

Although it is a blasphemous thought, it has cropped up in many a legal mind during the last few weeks: if bets were placed on the Supreme Court's decisions, only a very shrewd bookie would emerge victorious.

She has dressed Princess Anne, Gloria Vanderbilt. Jackie Onassis, Bianca Jagger and the Duchess of Kent. And now she is in India, weaving her way through acres and acres, soaking in the riot of colours, the designs, the craft - to ultimately produce an Indian collection.

When Prabhakar Reddy, an engineer from Guntur in Andhra Pradesh, moved down to Bangalore along with his family recently to take up a job in a public sector industry which had offered him a Rs 300 hike in salary, he was following one of the innate urgings of man: to migrate in search of greener pastures.

Malika Pukhraj, Pakistan's celebrated ghazal queen, was in the capital last fortnight to give her first ever public performance. Popular as a radio artiste, Pukhraj, in her heydays used to give six programmes on Lahore Radio and two each in Delhi and Lucknow every month.

Cricket, the most popular spectator sport in India, can easily make or unmake heroes. The number of runs on the score-board can seal the fate of a player on the Test team. Gundappa Vishwanath, the ageing star of the game, was one such man who had to prove his worth at the start of the series. With two brilliant centuries at Delhi and Madras, however, Vishwanath has more than assured himself a place in the team. A profile of the prolific batsman.

It is something unheard of in the recent history of the Indian Railways: polished wooden panels, clean tiled bathrooms, six-inch mattresses, electric fittings that actually work, and to top it all, khidmatgars dressed in the livery of kingdoms long absorbed into the Indian democracy.

It had all the ingredients of an Agatha Christie thriller: a baroness with mysterious antecedents attending a multimillionaire friends wedding extravaganza, jet-setting guests from all corners of the globe decked in priceless jewels, and, to cap it all, the case of the baroness vanishing diamonds from a five-star hotel locker.

Law enforcement agencies rarely succeed in keeping up with "ingenious minds" criminal bent on making that fast buck. Even if a few swindlers are caught, a majority of them carry on with their business unfettered by the letter of the law.

West Bengal is bucking national trends once again. At a time when the opposition parties are coming together at the national level to fight Mrs Gandhi, the Janata and the Congress(S) are joining hands with the Congress(I) to oppose the ruling Left Democratic Front in the coming midterm poll in the state.

It had all the trappings of a medieval chariot race: bloodthirsty roars, primeval noises, brutality and fierce competition. But the pomp and splendour was rustic. The chariot was a plank made of jungle wood and in some races it was dispensed with.

No chief minister in the country has had as much trouble with his bureaucrats as Bihar's Jagannath Mishra. The ranks of the rebels among the administrators has grown sharply during the past six months. Now one more has raised the standard of revolt after he was transferred from his post.

When the Kerala High Court stumbled on the fact that three students had been admitted to the MBBS course on the basis of false mark-sheets nobody suspected the enormous proportions that the scandal would assume.

Rarely had an event invited such determined and concerted action by the Union Government. When the 24-hour national strike called by the National Campaign Committee ended, two things stood out clearly.

Chinnamanna Narayanaswamy Naidu, 59, president of the Tamil Nadu Agriculturists' Association announced his group's decision to contest the panchayat elections in the state, considered by many to be a mini-general election, he used words which sounded innocuous enough.

The police in India are rather frightening hulks of flesh, with their forbidding lathis and their even more forbidding needles. Thus it comes as something of pleasant shock to discover that the guardians have a sense of humour.

Babasaheb Ananlrao Bhosale, 61, the heavy-jowled, bulbous-eyed chief minister of Maharashtra who replaced his controversial predecessor, Abdul Rehman Antulay, last fortnight, is, as Churchill said about Attlee, "a modest man with a lot to be modest about".

The factional tussle within the Congress(I) which began with the ouster of the Taimur ministry last June has been resolved for the time being with the appointment of Keshab Chandra Gogoi as chief minister.

Punjab Chief Minister Darbara Singh has long been in search of a stick with which to beat his arch rival Union Home Minister Zail Singh, and with the arrest of Dal Khalsa presidium member Harsimran Singh, the self-confessed mastermind of the September 1981 hijacking, it seems he has found it at last.

While the north-eastern states of Assam and Manipur remain engulfed in periodic spates of violence, reports reaching intelligence sources last fortnight indicated a perturbing increase in the trafficking of explosives.

The Madhya Pradesh police have good reason to be pleased with themselves. Last month as the corpses of Devi Singh and four other dacoits lay grotesquely in the sun in Shivpuri several firsts had been totted up.

Controversies are often made of strange stuff. And, on the surface of it, there could be no more unsuited candidate for mud-slinging than a tigress born in a zoo, bred on a private estate and released into a jungle.

Exploding onto the stage in a cloudburst of colours and flashing limbs, the 200-member troupe representing six African countries left the stunned audience feeling they had just collectively been through a whirlpool.

For social activists the street play is a medium to transmit messages about the evils of dowry, atrocities against women and suchlike. On the Telugu stage few troupes use the street play technique to present these kinds of themes.

Yakshagana, an obscure traditional folk theatre of Karnataka, has finally come of age. A 10-day national festival held in Udipi, 65 km from Mangalore last fortnight has amply underscored the renewed nation-wide interest in this ancient art-form.

At 76, R.K. Narayan's literary vision or skill has not dimmed: he is busy completing his twelfth novel, the story of a tiger who attains mystical powers, set as usual in the ever-growing small town of Malgudi - home of his stories through which have flitted characters as disparate but all equally anarchic as Mr Sampath, Raju the Guide, or even the notorious Maneater of Malgudi.

Nothing marks the appeal of an issue of a news magazine as much as its cover - the choice of story and the cover illustration. The cover is, after all, what the prospective buyer and reader first confronts.

Tottering on the verge of bankruptcy and unable to stem the tide of mismanagement and executive corruption, the Congress(I) high command - which holds controlling shares through a trust - was toying with two alternatives: to close down most of its publications, or to sack the present board of directors of the company that publishes the Herald chain.

Pakistan's bespectacled Foreign Minister, Agha Shahi, arrived in New Delhi to initiate the first high-level official parley over the controversial issue since President Zia first held out his surprising olive branch.

The 68,000-strong Bangladesh Army is - as a Western diplomat in New Delhi gently put it - in a state of permanent rebellion. Within two months of the election of 75-year-old Abdus Sattar as president of the volatile republic, the army is stridently staking its claim to a share of power.

Running into its third year, the occupation of Afghanistan by the Soviet army has brought about a semblance of routine order. Without its presence, observers feel the Karmal Government would collapse. In Kabul, life is punctuated by night curfew, and Soviet soldiers nervously guard an unpopular government. Mujahideen guerillas, though fragmented and scattered, are enough of a nuisance so that the occupiers are kept constantly on the alert. An exclusive report from Kabul.